


a way of shutting my eyes

by verity



Category: Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain | Amélie (2001)
Genre: Gen, Photographs, Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-01
Updated: 2012-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-04 16:03:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amélie fixes each thing that strikes her in her mind, absorbs its light; becomes the medium.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a way of shutting my eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueteak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueteak/gifts).



> photos (most from Montmartre) taken by Martin E. McBriarty on our trip to France in January 2012, cropping and coloring by me with help from some actions by [awmp](http://awmp.livejournal.com/)

  


The first photographs Amélie takes document what she sees around her. Her Instamatic seizes the world whole: her photos are real as the afterimage when she closes her eyes. In the viewfinder, she frames animals floating against cerulean blue, the neighborhood streets, _disaster_. 

For a day, she's horrified and mesmerized by the incredible destructive power of her camera.

True disaster, when it strikes, is nothing like those photos. The woman hurtles toward them, incredibly, impossibly. Amélie is still holding her mother's hand when her mother falls, dragged down by the woman who fell from the sky. Amélie's knees scrape against the ground, her cheek hits her mother's arm. When she turns her head, all she can see is her mother's hair, loosened from its hold by the collision.

  


Afterwards, when Amélie can see the passing of each moment as a kind of death, photography seems futile. Her drawings are dull and lifeless, her stories uninspired, grasping at something that slips further and further away with each new pursuit. Camera, crayon, pencil, they're all insufficient. How could Amélie paint/portray/describe the impossibility of remembering the last look on her mother's face, seeking and finding instead the long stretch of her mother's neck as she craned her head up toward the source of that fatal scream? There's no way to convey the inevitability of it, the way Amélie's body tensed before the impact, the way it knew before her. Her vocabulary deserts her.

So she fixes each thing that strikes her in her mind, absorbs its light; becomes the medium.

  


As she grows older, the home she shares with her father seems smaller and smaller, the skies bounded and empty. Even the gnome looks disappointed. She preserves small things: the careful calligraphy on the inside flap of a used book, a bird on the tree outside her bedroom, the sweet filling of a _macaron à la fraise_.

Her father drives her to the station the day she leaves for Paris. "I worry about you in the city," he says, frowning, as if she's heading for a flophouse and not the apartment in the 18th arrondissement his childless aunt left vacant when she died last year. "So far away."

Amélie promises she'll be careful.

  


Life in Paris is a lot like gazing through a viewfinder. Each day she walks down the narrow streets, surrounded by people but anonymous, seen and unseen in the same moment. The things that give her most pleasure are inanimate; the smooth brush of lentils against her hand when she sinks it inside the sack, the thrill of cracking her spoon against caramelized sugar, the cool weight of a stone in her hand before she skips it along the river.

In movie theaters, she turns her invisibility around, reflects it on others like a mirror when she looks up into their rapt, distant faces.

  


In Montmartre there are plenty of sex shops, exactly the sort of places where her father thinks someone will drug her and sell her into slavery, or let her buy a dirty VHS. Amélie passes them on her walks but never goes in. She dates a few men she meets at the Two Windmills, loses her virginity to one of them. They have sex a few times, but it's never like it was in the books she read as a teenager. She can't shut off her mind, the part of her that's forever cataloguing, engaged in capturing each moment as it happens, more true and exact than any photograph.

She'd rather sit on her rooftop and count the number of couples orgasming around her: _13!_

  


On her days off, Amélie likes to hike the long steps up to Sacré-Cœur and look out over the city. There's a bus that goes most of the way up, but that's no fun. Half the pleasure in the view is the difficulty in attaining it. So: the hike, the trudge upstream, side by side with the pious (few) and the tourists (many). In motion, in the crowd, she disappears, only to emerge at the top when she turns around to be confronted with the city spread beneath her.

It's when she's most separate that she feels most content, when the world feels most real.

  


Usually, Amélie eats dinner at home or at the Two Windmills, but sometimes she likes to venture further afield. She's determined to eat a croque madame in every arrondissement, even when it means she's paying too much for stiff bread and overcooked eggs somewhere with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Sometimes she buys postcards from vendors nearby that she mails to no one, even when the print quality is such that she'd do better taking a photo with her old Instamatic.

Her favorite croque madame so far is at a little cafe not far from the Sainte-Chapelle. Amélie accepts when the waiter offers her sparkling water, cuts her sandwich into small pieces of white toast, sweet ham, melted cheese, runny egg. She knows exactly where she is, sits near a window where she can see the two towers of Notre Dame rising up toward the sky. And, oh, her camera could never have been enough to hold all that rises up in her, the long arch of white throat beneath her mother's upturned face, the blue of the sky, the carved stone pressing against the field of her vision. The way her mother's hair seemed so happy to escape from its confinement, so soft, and how Amélie had wanted to touch it, touch her, before the world rushed in around them.

She takes a bit of the croque madame and closes her eyes.

  
  


_Verity, Paris, January 2012_  



End file.
